A few days before SotM 2026 I was speaking to a friend and fellow attendee about the OSM community. I confidently told them the community is never very toxic, as at that time I’d never encountered wide-spread toxicity in OSM, nor had I ever felt that being a part of a marginalised group impacted the way people interacted with me or my contributions.

I’m sad to say that I no longer feel that way. I’ve written this post to increase awareness about this topic and to put this issue to rest, not to call out individuals.

Context

On the 14th of September I raised a question on the community forum. There had been an oppose vote which didn’t include a reason or feedback on my Lgbtq=* Revision proposal, which I found concerning. I posed that including a comment in an oppose vote was vital to the proposal process as it enables proposers to rewrite their proposals to account for the concerns of voters. I began writing a proposal to change the guidelines to require oppose votes to include a comment soon after.

During the RFC (feedback/discussion) phase of this proposal I actively sought out issues in my proposal; loopholes, poor phrasing, issues unaccounted for, etc. When people pointed them out I thanked them and edited the proposal accordingly, because my only goal was to write a strong proposal that strengthened the proposal process for everyone.

On Toxicity

I quickly found that not everyone was participating in this discussion with the goal of collaboratively working on a solution that a wide majority could agree on. Instead of providing useful feedback some contributors opted to tell me I’m wasting my time, that I’m just throwing a tantrum over the Lgbtq=* Revision. One contributor sent me a private message indicating that they would vote oppose on my Lgbtq=* Revision proposal because I “insist so much”. Another comment stated that I should read the comments again “slowly”, and that I should stop and think before continuing to discuss my point of view, implying that I simply don’t understand the provided counter-arguments.

The goal of RFC is to provide constructive feedback which can be used to improve a proposal. It should never be used to collectively attack and insult a proposer with the goal of making them abandon their proposal. But on the forum this behaviour isn’t just present, it’s widely tolerated.

While these comments were hurtful and discouraging, I tried not to pay them too much mind. But that changed when last week’s issue of weeklyOSM was published.

On weeklyOSM

In issue 844 of weeklyOSM a short paragraph was published about my proposal. At the time of publishing the paragraph stated the following:

Because there were three votes against the Lgbtq=* proposal without a reason being provided (see the discussion on the OSM Community forum about it), Spughetti, the author of the proposal, has written a proposal to introduce a strict requirement to provide a valid reason to vote against a proposal. The reactions on some posts show a split in the community. This is not a good sign for a proposal required to pass the 75% requirement in the voting phase.

There are a number of issues with this paragraph:

1. It leads by stating that my motivation for writing this proposal is simply that there were oppose votes without an included reason on my Lgbtq=* Revision proposal. This is untrue, the mentioned oppose votes revealed to me what I believe to be an issue with the voting guidelines, that issue is my motivation for writing my proposal, not the oppose votes on the Lgbtq=* Revision directly. Claiming that it is is misleading to readers.
2. The phrase “valid reason” appears in this paragraph but does not appear in the proposal. I’ve (wrongly) used this phrase in the discussion thread but have tried to steer clear of it because it implies subjectivity, which the proposal tries to avoid through objective criteria. Including it so prominently in this paragraph is misleading and not based on the contents of the proposal.
3. The paragraph directly links to a counter-argument that is directly related to the proposal, but an argument of mine that was linked had hardly anything to do with the proposal.
4. The paragraph ends by saying that split opinion is “not a good sign” for a proposal. This is unnecessarily leading to readers.

I don’t care which side of the discussion you’re on, anyone can see that this paragraph contains bias. And in the midst of all this bias I was even directly mentioned by name, possibly hurting my professional reputation in the process.

A simple sentence such as “Spughetti proposed a change to the voting guidelines that would require oppose votes to include a reason” would have sufficed. It contains verifiable, objective information that can be found in the proposal and doesn’t favour either side of the discussion.

The reaction of many in the community, including an editor and a co-founder of weeklyOSM, was clear; weeklyOSM has no obligation to be neutral. If that really is the case, and weeklyOSM is to contain bias, we should at the very least know whose bias it is. As it stands anyone can submit a biased paragraph about a topic they feel strongly about in order to influence public opinion about said topic, and they can do so anonymously. At the time of writing it is unclear who wrote this paragraph.

After a private email correspondence detailing my concerns to the weeklyOSM team, they opted to only change the word “Because” to “After” in the opening sentence and remove the last sentence of the paragraph. The editor responding on behalf of weeklyOSM had been active in the RFC thread on the opposing side of the discussion and discouraged me from continuing to work on my proposal in their response.

On Assuming Good Faith

It’s important to assume good faith in the OSM community. The vast majority of contributors share the goal of making the best world map, and we all work collaboratively to achieve that goal. This rarely has to be called into question.

This however does not mean that bad faith contributions never occur in our community. Making non-constructive comments to dissuade another contributor from discussing an idea, anonymously submitting a biased paragraph to weeklyOSM, or going so far as to personally insult another contributor are not signs of contributions made in good faith. And it’s reasonable for a contributor to push back when they are the target of such behaviour.

When pushing back on said behaviour there has been outrage over the fact that someone dared to not assume good faith, as if discouraging bad faith is a more heinous offense than acting in bad faith. Some contributors acknowledged that there were bad actors but discouraged me from publicly acknowledging it on the basis that acknowledgment encourages the behaviour. That to me seems backwards, telling the targets of bad faith contributions to keep quiet does nothing but signal to bad actors that their behaviour is tolerated and won’t lead to any backlash. This fosters a culture of zero accountability.

In Closing

My main concern is not about bad faith contributions in our community, but rather the way we respond to them. When we see that a fellow community member is being treated unfairly we shouldn’t turn a blind eye for the sake of assuming good faith, because acting in good faith is just as, if not a more important part of etiquette. I believe community discussions would benefit a lot if we took acting in good faith as seriously as we do assuming good faith.

_{No generative artificial intelligence was used in the writing of this post.}